4 Must-Haves to Convert Developers on your Homepage
For this first episode of the B2D Series, we are going to look at the foundation of any successful developer’s tool: a homepage that converts.
Because the first point of contact with your prospects will more likely be indirect (think email, ads, or social presence), your homepage should convey quickly and efficiently your value proposition. Additionally, as you grow and your understanding of what really resonates with your prospects changes, so should your homepage.
Playing catch up? Discover the B2D Series, a series of articles that focuses on best practices for marketing your product to developers. Read more about that here: DIY Marketing for Developers.
Coming up with a great homepage is definitely not easy. Countless marketers have already written tips and tricks about it, that we’re not going to bother repeating. Rather, we’ll illustrate which building blocks your homepage should have when you’re marketing directly to developers.
Crafting a website that speaks to your audience
If you’re anything like us, you see clearly through the usual business-y BS that uses the same buzzwords over and over* again. There’s nothing more frustrating than wasting time on a website that tries to sell you yet another obscure acronym, rather than their actual product. As developers, we need to understand the product, go through some code, and quickly decide whether it will fit in our stack. And that’s a tough act to pull off.
We uncovered 4 key must-haves for any homepage targeted towards developers. They’re as follows:
- A fully-functional live demo, nothing fake
- Excerpts of the code needed run it
- A documentation that comprehensively walks you through the product
- A customer support always available
Let’s dive more into these below.
A live demo to showcase your product’s prowesses
There is no better way to assess the quality of a software than going through a live demo of it. And lucky for us, with a SaaS, it’s technically easy to set one up. Simply spin up an instance of your software with dummy data, and you’re good to go!
However, you should definitely consider your live demo a product of its own. Roughly 8 out of 10 people who visit our homepage end up signing up on Forest through our live demo. This means that your live demo comes with the same scaling issue as your product. Clearly, your live demo needs to be an integral part of your roadmap and receive as much attention as your product.
Depending on your product, you can choose to directly demo your product on your homepage (as in the case of Algolia and Auth0 below) or you can choose to include screenshots of your live demo which sits on another page.
Bits of code to get a sense of the implementation
Excerpts of code should be among the first things a curious technical visitor sees on your site. It is the easiest proxy with which one can make his own mind over the ease of installation of the solution, and whether it’d fit within his stack and architecture.
Those bits of code should cover the basics of your solution, giving away just enough info to satisfy your prospect’s inner-geek. The more languages / frameworks you support, the more telling it’ll be as you’ll be able to present your product’s versatility in one single box. See the example of Algolia below.
Of course, this goes only for companies where it makes sense technically. Docker, as pictured below, prefers to show a diagram of the inner-workings of their container technology rather than a bland few lines of code that would in no way do it justice.
A documentation that reads like a novel
While your homepage is your business’ pitch, your documentation is where your visitor can truly assess whether your tech is relevant to his business. Unfortunately, the doc is too often an afterthought in the development process.
Even here at Forest, where we’ve put the emphasis on providing a clearly legible documentation from day one, we end up spending a few hours every now and then to keep it on point.
Every time you change your code, your doc should undergo the same refactorings. In other words, your doc should grow hand in hands with your code. We’ve jokingly called this process continuous documentation. Check out Mailjet and Keen.io’s docs to get a better idea of what it means to have a successful documentation.
Live support one click away
When visitors start pouring into your website, you’ll want to have some sort of system in place to instantaneously answer their various inquiries.
Whether you go for the fully-fledged Intercom suite, plug directly into your helpdesk software or settle for the leaner live chat-only option, what matters is for your visitors to have a single point to turn to in case any question arises during their short time on your homepage.
That’s actually something we were guilty of postponing, keeping it for later as more urgent things were under development with the launch date closing in, and ended up forgetting. That caused a slight backlash during our launch day, and we hastily had to implement it.
Keep room for the unexpected
However good all your plans are, always keep room for the unexpected. We learned this lesson the day of our soft launch: we realized that we didn’t keep the information of our visitors who were interested but whose stack we did not support yet.
We slightly changed one of our CTAs to include a dropdown with the visitor’s framework of choice, alongside their email address, and that was it. With that small change, we now know which framework to support next, and have a list of interested beta testers.
Further, this kind of feature is sometimes a requirement if you’re presenting a product that’s not available yet, as you do not want to lose visitors whose interest you’ve piqued. Definitely a trick to keep up your sleeve.
Wrapping up
Your homepage is a tremendous part of your online presence, and as such, it deserves a great deal of attention. After scouring through the web and asking some of the first B2Ders, we concluded that what sets you apart as a successful B2D business if a deep understanding of your audience.
Generic marketing that tries to sell rather than genuinely present your product will not cut it with developers. They will see through your buzzword fog and leave disappointed. As we’ve experienced firsthand, in order to provide an impactful pitch, you’ll need to have at least the following elements on your homepage:
- A live demo
- Excerpts of your code in action
- A clear and concise documentation
- Live support readily available
Of course, this is obviously not an exhaustive list, and as we’ve explained above, we highly value intuitive experiments.
Your website should be as much an experiment as the rest of your marketing, one you’ll fine tune as you learn more about what resonates with your customers.
As always, you’ll want to keep iterating and have a homepage that presents a genuine picture of your business as it matures and gains in popularity. Just have a look at what we’ve already come from, if you need anymore proof!
Continue reading the B2D Series:
